Beverly Wright Quotes

Any climate bill has to deal with both repairing EJ communities and reducing climate change. The fact of the matter is that they go hand in hand, because one of the reasons that we are the way we are is because of what we’ve done to communities of color across this country — putting fossil fuel industry facilities in our communities, not caring about our health or our lives, that’s why we’re here. We can’t move forward without addressing that.

After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered.

My thing was, if you’re not going to protect the citizens at least tell them what they need to do to protect themselves. So we started the Safeway Back Home campaign, where people remediated their own properties and planted new grass, and so on.

The Harvard study comes out and I’m like, ‘OK, now I understand.' Black people are dying because of where we live.

In New Orleans east, we have one supermarket. I went to the supermarket yesterday. I could get no lettuce, you know, no fruit…all the fruit gone. It was just amazing. 70,000 people, one supermarket in New Orleans east. That’s it. And I have to tell you, I’ve not been a big McDonald’s fan, but after Katrina, if it weren’t for McDonald’s we wouldn’t have had anything to eat. It was like people just forgot about us.

I think that black people’s concerns about the environment and environmental justice are synonymous. I believe that black people understand the environment because of the injustices that exist in their communities as it relates to their health and exposure. It all merges around the larger concept of civil rights, and so we have combined the idea of environmental protection with civil rights.

People of my age group are so angry, Why are we in the same place? We’ve actually lost some of the progress.

it is important to recognize that governments seldom initiate action to address environmental problems. Governments generally respond to outside pressure, and this pressure must be applied over an extended period of time to achieve lasting results.

it seems difficult to talk about putting in place a project that deals with racial discrimination when you can’t use race in evaluating it. It’s really insane.

A colonial mentality exists in the South, where local governments and big business take advantage of people who are politically and economically powerless. This mentality emerged from the region's earlier marriage to slavery and the plantation system-a brutal system that exploited both humans and the land.

I don’t think we should talk about reducing greenhouse gases and saving the planet without environmental justice being shoulder to shoulder with that.

history of human slavery spawned environmental racism in the United States.

Any project that moves forward should be inclusive of three things: It will not harm communities. It will not contribute to the climate crisis. And it will not perpetuate racially disproportionate burdens of pollution. Any program that we bring in to solve the problem must have these three principles embedded in it so we don’t make the same mistakes.

On liquefied natural gas, the majority of the places where they want to put liquefied gas facilities are in poor and minority communities. So the same group of people is now being asked to bear the burden of our transition [from fossil fuels]. What kind of transition is that for communities?

There was a lot of discrimination against African-Americans with apartments. You would go there to rent, you’d call, and it was available, and when you got there it wasn’t. And then later you found out there were rental units, but they were not renting to us. They had met their quota of African-Americans.